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Skyrim: New Age of Prosperity Wiki
Welcome to the Skyrim: New Age of Prosperity (SNAP) Wiki A community project, that will combine the efforts and creativity of many modding authors into a Skyrim experience that has the gamer playing in a pseudo reality a decade on from the original game. This is intended as a community project. I have spent some time going through a large proportion of mods (still large number to go however) on Nexus that deal with the expansion or changing of the environment of Skyrim. First of all I have been blown away by the level of effort that people have put into their creations and just how incredible everything looks and plays. It is staggering. The result of this in my opinion is that through a combined selection of these (around 50 at the moment, but expanding rapidly), shows a very rich tapestry of how the realm might look like under the expansion of a prosperous period in Skyrim, compared from the original look that Bethesda released. There are new cities. Some existing cities have almost doubled in size. There are numerous new towns, villages, castle, mansions, palaces, estates, abodes, ruins, forts, dungeons, etc. Some have been restored, while others have a look of slight disrepair. Also into this fold are a number of new quests that can be under taken. With this material the main aims of the project are as follows: 1. Create a platform that bundles together new or expanded upon cities, towns, settlements, hamlets, houses, forts, landscape, dungeons, caves, quests, etc to obtain a look and feel of what Skyrim *might* be like under a pusedo reality period of great prosperity. This will probably be within 10-20 year time frame, from the fall of Alduin. 2. The purpose of SNAP is to mainly expose the many efforts of the modding community on work that has already been done or are works-in-progress, so that gamers can easily immerse themselves into the vast new changes that can be applied to the Skyrim world. 3. Create a community that can help each other with future goals, solve problems and encourage creativity with a big picture plan in mind. 4. Create a forum and a wiki to communicate the many facets that will be involved in this project. 5. Create a community based story and lore around events and characters, to reflect a 10-20 year passage of time under a period of vast economic growth. It should be a period of relative peace to reflect the expansion of cities, restoration of buildings and population growth. The lore will probably not be as intended by Bethesda, as I’m sure this history has already been written. It will be a fans take on events and characters, but primarily needs to be based on the works that modders have already created. 6. Coordinate and recruit people for various aspects of the project. 7. Create quests around the community based lore, and the editing and creation of the NPCs to fit into this framework. 8. Manage and coordinate the world space of these and potential future mods that feature in this series. This might mean the relocation of existing dungeons/caves/mines as some of them take up the same world space. For example a tendency to put them around Riverwood for convenience. 9. Manage the level of questing and loot for balanced game play. The intention of the project is not get too technical with the backstory, as the prime objective is to create a world that fits in with the already created environments. The idea will be to have as much fun with the lore as possible. Because of the large scope of this project, I have broken it up into what I would consider more manageable objectives and phases. The intention is not to actually combine them into a singular mod. All web-pages, uploading, updating etc will remain at the discretion and creativity of the authors, allowing them to pull out of the project at anytime. However with a lot of support, hopefully that won’t be the case. My motivation behind this project is simply that I feel that based off the number of views/downloads/endorsements that many of these have, that it is not a reflection of how much enjoyment can be achieved through them, especially when in combination. There are over 10 million Skyrim players; I’m sure many of them excited about being re-introduced to new content to the game. The goal is to create a platform that will capture the imagination of the gamer and thus a greater audience for the author’s creations. Everybody is a bit happier. I hope you agree. I’m also going to outlay some reasons why many people probably don’t view, download or endorse more of these. These are assumptions based off my own experience. *People are wary about installing mods that change what was intended for the original look of the game. *There is a fear that it might be buggy or break the quests or story line of their original game. *For those that are looking for new quests, a worry that they are not Elder Scroll themed enough and/or that the loot and items are not in keeping with the standard intention of game balance. Which to be fair in many cases can be the case. *For those locations where there are numerous mods (i.e. Whiterun, Riverwood, etc) a tendency to pick one over another based on personal preference, rather than an actual back story setting. *There is not quite enough incentive or reasoning behind why they should download and install to see a particular change. This is a subjective statement, it's their loss, but covers that individually some mods don't quite have enough features/change to intice the user. *There are over 10,000 mods and they simply haven't found it yet! I think this project can alleviate some of these problems and misconceptions. My first point of call is for the authors to express your level of interest in this proposed project and what might be involved for you. My aim is to try and make this as invisible to you as possible, but it will always come down to what your mod does and how it might need to be changed in the future to work within the new proposed setting. The most involvement will be with the city, town, village and hamlet mods. A lot of you won't have to do anything, as you've made some structure that stands alone nicely indeed. However it would be great to get everybody involved, as key to this project will be modding experience and people willing to work on it as a whole. Is this something you would be interested in helping with? The other thing that everybody should know is that almost all of the mods are still works-in-progress of varying degrees. This is fine, almost better, as hopefully as a community we will be able to shape a big picture. For a list of mods that I think should be include in this project please select from the links: Cities, towns, villages and hamlets Castles, mansions, palaces and estates Abodes Ruins, forts and abandoned structures Dungeons Landscape changes In regards to most of the mods based around quests and dunegons, although they don't reflect a "new age in prosperity", I feel that so much hard work has been put into them, that under this framework it will give gamers a choice of discovering these many wonderful adventures. This project is about exposing the great additions that can be found for Skyrim and trying to do it in a way that is seamless for the gamer. The first phase is to simply have a mod page that introduces the idea of “Skyrim: New Age of Prosperity” with the intentions of the project, a bit of lore, and with links to the various mods. Cool, not much effort here people. I just need you to confirm that you are onboard with this idea. If I can briefly set the scene: Dragons have left the land and peace has been restored to the realm of Skyrim. Cities have been built due to the rapildy swelling popluation of Skyrim. The city of Saviik on top of a hill overlooking the Eastmarch and Riften. The underground city built in a cavern by the Dunmer. The tree town inhabited by the Bosmer. Other mysteries towns have risen, with dark secrets to uncover. Solitude, Windhelm, Winterhold, Riften and most of the other major towns have been fully restored with additional markets, inns, shops and other buildings necessary to fit their status. Whiterun has become a hub of trade extending it's walls to accomodate the many travellers seeking shelter. Villages have cropped up all of the place, and many of the non-human races now have settlements they can now call their own. People build where they can. The land is scattered with abodes, many of them showing the wealth that has come into the northern-end of Tamerial. Even the more moddest homes still show that they have proud owners with an attention to detail. This will leave a fairly incomplete scenario for the gamer however as unfortunately the world will look a decade has passed, but their quests, characters, etc will not reflect the proposed timeline. But it’s a start and the idea is to get people exposed and tracking which mods are involved and to see what level of interest there might be in this project. One of the objectives is to tie up the locations for gamers so that they have a basic means to find the locations*. Again for the purposes of manageability I have broken this up into various phases. However the ultimate goal is to have a main quest line that will have the player becoming one of the primary characters with a fully immersive story, objectives and decisions. Obviously this is a lot of work and coordination. So with smaller goals this will be achievable. Second Phase: 1. A quest line that ties together the locations loosely. It will have minimal story telling and only have fragments of the planned final community based lore. 2. Organised placement of world objects, mainly dealing with dungeons, caves, etc, so that they can all run in parallel. 3. For the quests and dungeons organise a system of relatively balanced loot. 4. Try and offer a sequence of events that will match the level the player is at. Quest and Dungeons will be sequenced, based on the difficulty. However this is Elder Scrolls so if they want to do them in any order then they are more than welcome, they might just get their asses kicked however. With trying to tie locations together in this second phase I want to keep it as simplistic as possible, while still giving the player enough purpose to seek out the next location. I have an idea that you can read here, but very open to suggestions for how this could be done. In relation to some of the dungeons and quests there is a tendency to offer up god like items, stacks of cash, etc. I’m guessing as a means to entice people to try them. There will always be an audience for this, but within the SNAP framework I’m hoping to offer up balanced game play, and in the process reach another target audience which are those simply looking for fun new things that are not over-powered. The third phase is really the one that introduces the player to SNAP as an immersive world. Third Phase: 1. Remove quests in vanilla game that would not reflect the proposed time-line. This will probably mean most of them. As you can see this really is intended for players starting new characters. Will probably have to be a requirement. 2. Introduce a new main quest line that is the premise for SNAP. 3. Change/Remove existing NPCs to reflect time period passed. For richer or poorer, dead or alive, stuff of legend or still the inn keeper? 4. Those NPCs that feature in original version will initially have no additional side quests. Dialogue will be based around their history for the past decade. No voice acting, unless miracles happen of course. 5. Introduce additional new NPCs. Realistically no voice acting. 6. Abodes that don’t have NPC to be populated. 7. There will be no faction based quests. Besides the main quest, the 20 new quests and the exploration of the vastly changed environments, interaction will be pretty minimal outside of these. However as a general feel to a period of prosperity I would like to include many travellers between cities because of greatly improved trade routes, compared to the original game. The roads will be much more sociable and adventuring will be encouraged with more NPC interactions outside of city walls. Some of the original cities will have no quest objectives. They will be filled some of the original NPCs, with lots of non-essential NPCs to give them a lively feel, but the player should be aware that they won’t have objectives within those city walls, other than find out what has happened in the past decade. I think only Whiterun will feature heavily within the main quest, as this is where most of the changes have happened. Whiterun under SNAP really has a capital feel to it and it has a close proximity to the new cities as well. SNAP is not intended to be Skyrim all over again. No 75 hours of play. But there is still a wealth of content to be had and should have most gamers playing for days, with the final product probably for weeks. Hopefully there will be a lot of ideas around each faction and each character and what possible quests and interaction will surround them. This will not be included in this phase however for manageability. As stated will probably be a requirement to start with a new character. I was thinking either the player will need to use ‘alternate start – live another life’ mod, or better still a custom start built into main quest module. With regards to NPC population there is a wealth of existing mods, with followers, NPCs, etc that can be resourced upon to help with this enormous process. I guess this will be a side project within itself. Fourth Phase: 1. Faction based quests and stories. 2. Faction based interaction, i.e. if there are feuds between each other. 3. All essential NPCs have full dialogue interactions in regards to quests. Realistically not voiced. Now the world is starting to feel wholly immersive again. There will be lots of people to talk to, lots of things to do. There is so much to catch up on with old friends and enemies alike. Probably each faction quest lines will be introduced as they become available. So this phase is over a period of time. Fifth Phase: 1. NPCs are fully voiced!?! New NPCs will be achievable, but trying to get voice actors that sound vaguely like the original characters! I don’t have high expectations that this is possible, but let’s see what happens when we get to this stage. 2. Who knows…more, more, more please? There are obviously no limits to where this can go. I look forward to getting to this stage and playing it all over again! Ongoing things that I would like to happen in parallel with all phases. Authors, who have done a great job so far, remain focused on maintaining the work on the internal interactions within their particular location. This will be strongly encouraged. Locations as stand alone modules will be a key to having lots of content. Those that have player homes, castles, hamlets, sanctuary, etc, to create a version that have interiors that are more lore friendly and are more based as NPC homes instead. This is mostly meaning removing some of the mod cons that usually come with all-in-one player sanctuaries. I think with the release of “Hearthfire” that pre-built player homes won’t need to be as important. But there is still room for having them as homes, just toned down a bit. Obviously in parallel with this is the continuing evolving back story on the history of what has happen in this 10-20 year time period, keeping in mind that this is just a story of what Skyrim *could* be like under a scenario of major prosperity to the region. It’s not a story of what *should* be or Bethesda take on events. More importantly it’s the actual integration of the magnificent new environments that will form the story. Also remembering that players have had different experiences and nothing is set in stone as for some the Imperials have won, for other the Storm Cloaks succeeded. This will be just one of those scenarios. I thought it would be more interesting to have the smallest period of time pass which would allow for cities to be created, but gives the potential for some characters to still be in their prime. From a lore point of view, it’s much easier if say only a couple of years have passed, but obviously a stretch on the believability of these new structures. Once again I’ll leave it to community to decide a period of time, but it would be nice to have some characters still in positions of power and prowess, while leaving maybe just enough time for huge structures to be created. I would like to give a brief overview of the mods that I think will shape the basics of the main quest significantly. The first ones I will mention are the cities. There are five new city/towns that I would like to include; Saviik City, Underground City, Obisan City, Little Falasini and City of the Ancients. These are all *wip*, but are still amazing as they stand today. There are also settlements that should definitely be part of the story; Fleetford, Pinewood Village are some that left a big impression. The WIKI will serve up descriptions of all the mods that I want to include in this project, broken down into categories. I’m envisioning much of loot items to be in the form of some of the extremely impressive armor and weapon mods that people have painstakingly created. Although most of these get plenty of exposure I still think they fall under the umbrella of creating an immersive world when they can be obtained in new quests. There still remains an audience that might not install them because they do offer up god like abilities at no real cost to get them. This project can offer an alternative to balancing this problem for players and still might introduce players to items that they might not have discovered otherwise on Nexus. I will point out that not everything is totally lore-friendly, as the imagination of the modder community tends to go the extra yard compared with the normal fair in Skyrim. With that said however, Elder Scrolls is fantasy and has seen its fair share of things like gaint glowing mushrooms. So keeping this in mind, the mods I have initially selected are still true enough to the fantasy world of the Elder Scrolls and nothing is too out of place. There has been a big filtering process and nothing breaks the laws of physics. Unfortunately there are a lot of great Dwemer style structures and cities that I feel can’t be included in this project. It’s a tough ask to immerse players in a world where these new structures have been built, when their creators don’t exist anymore. Sorry. Maybe if this project is successful we can look at "Skyrim: Age of the Dwemer". I’ll leave it there as there is a lot to digest. I have only just started this WIKI, so I will be adding to it extensively in the following weeks to include more details. *Don’t get me wrong I’m all for people to find these things on their own, world exploration is my style of play. But I did find it over-whelming at times to find some of the places, even with some stellar aerial views aka “console tcl” and bouncing between webpage’s and comments for hints. A lot of them are not marked on the map. Some still remain an enigma for me! But at this stage its imperative that every element to SNAP gets recognition of some kind. Once the main quest line is done, this will not be an issue, players will be free to roam the land and find everything on their own. Latest activity Category:Browse Category:Phase 2 Category:Cities, towns, villages and hamlets Category:Castles, mansions, palaces and estates Category:Abodes Category:Ruins, forts and abandoned structures Category:Landscape changes Category:Dungeons Category:Quests